On June 16 we are presenting the Berlin Diagonale - Show Camp during the Performing Arts Festival and invite visiting industry professionals to converse with the members of Berlin‘s independent performing arts community. With a bundled format, Berlin Diagonale - Show Camp provides a focus with the festival’s schedule of programming and the opportunity to become acquainted with a broad cross-section of Berlin’s independent performing arts community.

The tried-and-true open trade fair format with table conversations, videos and props is combined with 5-minute pitches, offering a brief overview with space for in-depth conversations.Afterward, we warmly invite the guests and participants to continue their conversations in a comfortable atmosphere at the bar with music by DJ Moritz Esyot.

AGENTUR FÜR ANERKENNUNG is a performance company as well as a platform for social recognition. Next to literary and theoretical texts we particularly focus on personal experiences of the participating artists. We condense their stories to dramatic scenes, and by adding comments, songs and various stage actions we develop an adequate form for each of our topics. Through this personal approach we invite our audience to engage in our questioning of the present and the future.

B_Tour, founded in 2013 by Christin Endter and Yael Sherill, is a curatorial platform for contemporary practices of locomotion, artistic guided tours, audio walks as well as practices of navigation and cartography in the worlds of the performing and visual arts. B_Tour presents projects with artists, activists and experts of the everyday who experiment with locomotion as an artistic practice, locomotion as a performative and/or political act, story-telling theory or anti-tourism. Ilona Marti is a Swiss artist who lives and works in Berlin. She works at the crossroads of sound, perception, public space and interaction. Alongside her own project work, she works as the second sound designer for the work Remote X by Rimini Protokoll.

The theater collective Berlocken is made up of Meriel Brütting, Laura Hagemann, Carolin Herzberg and Felicia Theus. Our interest rests in investigating social phenomena and making them accessible in our productions through the use of multifaceted situations, an associative dramaturgy and an abstract yet coded aesthetic and humorous language. The networking of our respective disciplines is an important aspect of the way we work. The preparatory work and the stage constitute a time and place for conscious decisions for us. Working alternatingly with approaches led by the head, body, music and heart, we rely upon improvisation as an artistic strategy.Texts, scenes, music and images are created during the rehearsal process.

The Berlin performer Bridge Markland is a virtuoso of role change and transformation. She is an artist who effortlessly crosses boundaries between dance, theatre, cabaret, gender performance, childrens and puppet theatre.Her specialtiy are one-woman-lip-sync shows of classical German theatre pieces using pop music and puppets. Faust I/Goethe, The Robbers/Schiller, Leonce and Lena/Büchner.With her incredible talent for transformation she performs all the roles, sometimes as human being sometimes as puppet. She edits the texts and enhances and contrasts them with the fitting pop music snippets. Her performances delight people of all ages starting at 13 years old and have been toured in Germany, Europe, Canada, USA and Australia.

Cinema Cantabile was founded in 2015 by the artists Agnes Fabich and Franziska Guggenbichler Beck 2015. Cinema Cantabile has set itself the goal of bringing together the best of opera and cinema, combining them and leading them into a new dimension. Cinema Cantabile is the opera with the people, for the people and about the people.

ANDERPLATZ (Germany, Italy, Argentina, USA, Spain) is an international collective of multi-disciplinary artists based in Berlin, who navigate the space between dance, theater and music, some of them performing and directing with companies such as Familie Flöz, Blue Man Group and Faizal Zeghoudi. They embrace the collision of their varying artistic experiences as vehemently as they do their divergent cultural backgrounds.In ANDERPLATZ the material is generated by the entire group.DETACHED, directed by Valentina Bordenave and Natasha Nixon, is their premiere.ANDERPLATZ are: Irene Fas Fita, Javier Ferrer Machín, Clara Gracia, Valentina Bordenave, Marina Rodriguez, Patrick Rupar, Laura de Arcos, Filippo Serra and Piet Starrett.

The Berlin and Hamburg based costa compagnie was founded by Felix Meyer-Christian as an open collaboration of interdisciplinary working emerging artists. Their latest works combine documentary, performative and choreographic methods and where invited to the IMPULSE-Festival, the Koerber Studio Junge Regie and other venues and galleries in Germany, Israel, Austria and the United States. The focus of several works has been global transformational processes and the human within. COSTA CIE. thus conducts interviews and collects audio- and video-footage on-site, such as in Afghanistan, the USA, Israel, Russia, Fukushima/Japan and the Lebanon. All members also work in other contexts and sometimes a production includes 2 or 3 and sometimes up to 15 artists.

EKATERINA STATKUS (SCHRÖDER UND STATKUS)

Ekaterina Statkus completed her first degree in cultural journalism at Lomonossow University in Moscow. After appearing in the performance This Progress by Tino Sehgal in the Guggenheim Museum in 2010, she decided to deepen her knowledge of the field of contemporary dance. In 2011, she was accepted into the interdisciplinary Master’s program in performance studies at the University of Hamburg. With the help of funding for emerging artists, she developed the performance The Winning Team Competition in collaboration with Helen Schröder, which won the jury prize of the Hauptsache frei festival. Ekaterina Statkus has lived in the German capital since 2014. She realized her first production in Berlin, Moments of Fear, at Ballhaus Ost in April 2016.

Elen Moos is a Spanish artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her passion for movement and rhythm led her to take a long journey after completing her studies in theater to research more about traditional dance forms and martial arts such as flamenco, Afro-Brazilian dance, capoeira and kalaripayattu. After completing her studies, she augmented her training at a variety of theatrical research centers such as the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards and the international center for theater research l’Albero. She has collaborated with a large number of theater ensembles and artists coming from a wide range of disciplines. Her research interests lie in human behavior, its contradictions and inconsistencies.

Choreographer, dancer, performance and dance educator. I have been a member of the board of K77 Stuido e.V. since April 2016 and have served as the director of various dance and theater projects (with professionals, children, young people, immigrants as well as blind and deaf individuals).In my stage work and workshops, I combine a variety of dance techniques (contemporary dance, modern dance, CI, improvisation) with somatic practices and visual art. I have also been creating site-specific dance projects for the last five years. Now I primarily work with the theme of choreography as a visual art form, image and identity.

DIE NEUE KOMPANIE

BEACH BIRDS - Spotlight on! Cellphone off! The new company is here! They sample and quote, they copy or steal uninhibitedly. Helen found her companion on the search for her own form of expression. They throw their bodies together, play spin the bottle and go to the limits of the imaginable. In the hopes of an unforgettable group piece, the new company digs through the choreographies, ideas and visions of their idols layer by layer. Alongside Flashdance or The Nelken-Line, a classic of pure form, Beach Birds by Merce Cunninghmam announced itself. From a giant mix of desires and the unrivalled inspirations, Helen Schröder and her ensemble continue to create new versions of their own company’s future.

MEZZOMIX

The independent theater collective MezzoMix was founded by Helena Kontoudakis in 2011 and constitutes itself a new for each project. It has posed itself the challenge of developing theater projects in the area of tension of the polarity of internal and external perception and circumstances which do justice to the story they are telling and its content and which also meet the audience at eye level.

Howool Baek is a Korean choreographer who lives and works in Berlin. The beginning of her choreographic work focused on the research into the types of movement possible within a narrowly constricted space. Her work then developed into the direction of research into the human body and the changing of its perception. Her current focus rests on the discovery of movement options and the individual expressive options of different parts of the body.

The music and theater collective INITIATIVE X TAGE was founded in Berlin in 2011 and, as an association of co-activities, forms an open network that constantly welcomes new experts and artists from a wide variety of disciplines.With the alternate reality opera X Tage bis zum Wunder, or X Days Until the Miracle in 2012, they examined the private sphere of the Internet, in 2014, Monument X subjected the notion of a functioning human relationship to a feasibility study before the performance series Porno & Piano, started in 2015, declared sex a public affair. During the Berlin Performing Arts Festival, they are now going after the role of motherhood with Stimmen nach dem Bauch #regretting motherhood (working title), demonstrating for dealing openly with all sides of motherhood.

Julia Rosa Stöckl was discovered by Andreas Prochaska for the feature film In 3 Tagen bist du tot 1 & 2, or, You’re Dead in Three Days 1 & 2, both of which celebrated their world premieres at the film festival in Locarno. At Tirole Landstheater during the artistic directorship of Briggite Fassbender, she performed the roles of Gretchen in Urfaust, Nina in The Seagull as well as Hedwig in The Wild Duck, amongst others. Alongside a great deal of work in independent theater in Austria, Germany and the USA, she has toured through the international theater landscape with Leaving Ziller Valley. She developed and premiered the piece together with Reinhard Göber during the DIVA Monodrama Festival in Austria. Julia Rosa has also appeared in the two-part television film Das Jüngste Gericht, or The Youngest Judge (directed by Urs Egger) as well as in numerous television series and independent films.

Katharina Haverich studied theater in England and theater studies in Berlin. She has assisted at Kampnagel, with The Wooster Group in New York and at Berlin’s House of World Cultures, supporting Tania Bruguera, Nevin Aladag and Okwui Enwezor. Since 2010, she has collaborated with the Argentinean artists E. G. Wehbi and Maricel Álvarez, internil, Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, Institut für Künstlerische Forschung and the choreograph Martin Nachbar. Her live art deals with moments of violent, continuous metamorphosis, investigating physical identity and emotional devastation while doing so. Her points of departure are idiosyncratic dream images and biographical circumstances. Katharina Haverich has been a mentee within the Mentoring Program for Emerging Artists offered by the Berlin Performing Arts Program since 2015.

A half-Japanese, half-Zimbabwean/South African endeavors to become a whole person. Training in various forms of martial arts, street dance in New York and contemporary dance at Hunter College as well as with European and Japanese teachers. Kazuma strives to communicate beyond culture and form(ality), working in very different contexts: performances in close collaboration with political activists and environmentalists, traveling as part of the ensemble with international choreographers such as Richard Siegal and Perrine Valli, teaching, commercial work and dancing all alone in untouched nature.

KOLONASTIX

KOLONASTIX- theatre for children and young people - was founded by Florentine Schara, Juliane Torhorst and Angela Hundsorfer in 2010. Our first production,„the fearsome Five“, was based on a graphic novel by Wolf Erlbruch, followed by „the little Ghost“(2013) and „Max and Moritz“ (2016). Each production is devised and directed collectively by the artists involved. With everyone of us working in a variety of fields of the performing arts the collective unites actors, directors, choreographers, musicians and performance designers. With our work we aim to encourage children to question the given authorities and to stand up for their rights and needs.KOLONASTIX produces theatre FOR children - the kind of theatre that takes them seriously and yet is fun to watch for children and adults.

komplexbrigade is an interdisciplinary group of artists from the fields of theater and game design. We create interactive theater and live experiences somewhere between theater, games and installation. Each audience member receives a role and discovers their opportunities for acting within a fictitious setting. The story is created through the interaction between performance, audience members and the environment, assuring that it is also astonishingly new.We create spaces in which current societal discourses can be investigated in a playful manner. In temporary creative communities with our audience, we search for political, social and technological utopias. In doing so, we use the opportunities of new media as well as those of classical theater

Earthport – the two cooperation partners.Lamusica (Egypt - ) New paths beyond those of municipal-commercial theater have been blazed by the Lamusica Independent Theatre Group founded by Nora Amin in the year 2000. In 16 years, Lamusica has realized 38 theater productions, most of them featuring direction and choreography by Nora Amin. Lamusica is one of the most frequently touring companies in Egypt and it speaks about what is left unsaid, combining art with rebellion.meet MIMOSA (Germany) - The performance collection meet MIMOSA was founded in 2012 by Eva Isolde Balzer. It has been developed in collaboration with Laura Werres, André Vollrath and an alternating slate of collaborators, most recently Sharon Dodua Otoo (winner of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize) and Pasqual Virginie Rotter, amongst others. meet MIMOSA deals with the shock of identities; previously, the focus was placed on white identity and white privilege

MS Schrittmacher was founded in Berlin in 1998. From the beginning the dance/perfomance group grasped itself as a pool of free artists whereby choreograph Martin Stiefermann succeeded in giving the company a unique artistic identity.In the past years MS Schrittmacher has made a name for itself with very different pieces and formats. Thereby the group questions constantly the classical situation of the spectator and looks for new perspectives for the audience.Next to their stage plays MS Schrittmacher went more and more into the public space with their research and performance formats. On their consequent search for the gro-tesque in the real the group is standing for a socio-political debate that always intervenes in people’s direct experience.

multicultural city is an international collective of artists that was founded by Monika Dobrowlanska in September 2012. We are looking for an artistic involvement with the living situation of social marginalized and minority groups. We are inspired by the location of Berlin as a multicultural metropolis. We maintain that different religions, skin colors and worldviews belong to Germany. We want to support mutual understanding, tolerance and respect through dealing with prejudices and stereotypes. We explore and develop experimental stage performances which result from the encounter of different cultures and arts. The first production of multicultural city, Displaced Women, took place on May 22, 2013 at Maxim Gorki Theater.

Natalie Reckert completed her studies at the National Centre for Circus Arts in London in 2007 and complete a year of studies at Visions in Motion, the school for contemporary dance in Kassel. She has toured as an ensemble member with Generating Company, Sugar Beast Circus and with Ilona Jäntti. She lives and works in Kassel and Berlin. Selbstportait mit Eiern, or Self-Portrait with Eggs, is her first independent production.In 2007, John-Paul Zaccarini wrote the following about her final project: „This was an absolutely proper fusion of handbalancing and dance. Every move had an element of innovation, inventiveness and thought. Outstanding“

OBJECTIVE SPECTACLE is a working hypothesis, production cluster and machine that incites reciprocal collaborations. The Berlin performance label consisting of the architect and stage designer Clementine Pohl and the director and musician Christoph Wirth creates interdisciplinary formats which fluctuate between environment, performance and installation. In reciprocal collaborations, OBJECTIVE SPECTACLE examine the functional mechanisms of the spectacular and the performative character of social as well as political spectacles. The black box of the stage space and the structure of the proscenium stage serve as literal lenses: seemingly determined social conditions are questioned with regard to possibly opening them and a possible reorganization.

Olivia Hyunsin Kim/ddanddarakim works as a choreographer and performer in Berlin. She studied dance and choreography at Falmouth University (Dartington College) and at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen. Her critical focus is placed on memories and their influence on the construction of identity. She prefers to work within the field of tension between the visible and invisible and between reality and fiction. She was nominated for the Ponto Performance Prize in 2016 and 2017. Her productions she came, she saw, she said: meme and MeMe - I see. Ah! have been presented at numerous festivals and venues, including Tanztagen Berlin in Sophiensælen Berlin, the Berlin Performing Arts Festival and Mousonturm Frankfurt.PETER WASCHINSKY

Peter Waschinsky, 66, was a significant figure in the struggle to establish puppet theater in the former East Germany as a genre of theater on equal footing with the others. He was the first director in the former East German to stage Brecht with puppets and he worked internationally as a solo puppeteer, making to large theater festivals as well as to the Muppets. He worked in alternative theaters and even on the street but was also part of significant state and municipal theater productions as a puppeteer or director.He now runs a small theater, the HACK-B-THEATER.In the words of the International Encyclopedia of Puppet Theater: “As an original creative artist as well as an uncomfortable combative artist, Waschinsky is one of the most significant representatives of contemporary puppet theater in German”.

Phyla was founded by Jennie Zimmermann and Gisbert Schürig in 2014, serving as a platform for their activities in music and performance. In cooperation with Vincenz Kokot, thea concentrate on the further developement of Minimal Improvisation, preferably working with voice and movement, electronics, guitar and ukulele.

post theater has worked since 1999 between theater, contemporary dance and media art. Over 60 performance in over 50 cities in 20 different countries have been created, often with local artists and often as commissioned work by international festivals (including the Singapore Arts Festival, Tanz im August Berlin, Tanzfest Weimar, Varna Summer). post theater is led by the media artist Hiroko Tanahashi and the dramaturg and director Max Schumacher. The production Jobs im Himmel (Jobs in Heaven) was the 2015 Stuttgart Theater Prize. In 2016, post theater produced House of Hope (winner of the 2017 Stuttgart Theater Prize) as well as Akademgorodok - Silicon Forest, a dance performance about cities of science and scientific utopias in Siberia and elsewhere. The Bulgarian-German coproduction about space stations Satellites premiered in 2017.

Regina Gyr studied acting and then theater directing at HFMT Hamburg. She has worked as a freelance director in Berlin since 2006 at a variety of independent performance venues. Her productions can be divided into three different formats: traditional spoken word theater with actors, performative live acts and puppet theater/object theater. Her point of departure is always a socio-political topic. The content determines the performance methodology, text material as well as the formal language and the site of the production. Her work can be understood as a direct, playful and risky contact with the audience.

Ren Saibara is a Japanese director, performer and actor. In Japan, she founded the artist collective actnetwork. She studied German studies in Tokyo and historical urban studies in Berlin. She has participated in multiple international theater festivals in Japan. In her work, she compares Japanese perspectives to European perspectives so that she can question global mechanisms comprising multiple time periods in current societal problems. Her interests are focused on interim spaces and the spaces in between on both thematic as well as aesthetic levels. For the 2017 Berlin Performing Arts Festival, she is presenting the sound performance Revolution in der Schublade der Hausapotheke, or Revolution in the Drawer of the Home Pharmacy at Vierte Welt together with burgund t brandt and Ernst Markus Stein.

RENEN ITZHAKI

Renen Itzhaki lives and works as a freelance artist. His work is created in the field of interference between performance, installation, video art and theater. He completed the Bachelor’s program in dance, context and choreography at the Inter-University Center for Dance (HZT) in Berlin in July 2016. Itzhaki primarily works with the processes of the creation of art, with authorship, with the conditions of the art market as well as with personal memory. He has already worked with a wide variety of artists, including Lia Rodrigues, Jeremy Shaw, David Weber-Krebs, Sandra Man + Moritz Majce and Florian Feigl and has presented his work in Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, Finland and Brazil.

Shakespeare Company Berlin is one of the most successful independent theater groups in Germany. We enthuse a growing audience with modern community theater and have been present in Berlin for 15 years. Our theater is direct, spectacular and virtuosic: the productions win over audiences through an expert acting ensemble, a high degree of musicality and our very own stage aesthetic, which consciously refrains from using elaborate scenography or stage technology. While our productions are invited to provide guest performance in Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Austria and Switzerland all throughout the year, the ensemble performs in its own open-air stage as well as the Lokhalle in Natur-Park Schöneberger Südgelände Berlin.

After a series of choreographic successes in Italy, Greece, Spain and Germany, Salvatore Siciliano founded the company in 2015. Siciliano’s work enjoys an excellent reception thanks to its distinctive ability to combine aesthetic with raw emotion as well as a pinch of sarcasm. Unusual performance locations are transformed into showplaces for new artistic experiences. His distinctive style is a refined visual expression of the human psyche. The choreographies conjure fragments of the religious and psychological subconscious within the heads of the audience members with a fresh sarcastic bite. Lines, eyes, words and strengths are combine within a collage of extreme movements.

Sisyphos, der Flugelefant” (SdF) is an independent production group, founded and led by the director Chang Nai Wen in Berlin. With a wide range of projects from theater and site-specific performances to Live Art, from documentary films to sound-space-video Installations, SdF‘s working principles have been direct, interactive and collaborative. At various venues in cities such as Berlin, Leipzig, Feldkirch, New York, Rome or Taipei, SdF has created all kinds of immersive “playgrounds” that enable communication between performers and spectators and among audience members and generate dialogue about important yet rarely talked about social and political issues.

SUSANNE STERN

Susanne Stern is an actor and director and studied acting in Cologne, at actorfactory Berlin and with Mel Churcher in London. She studied directing with Marcelo Diaz from 2014 to 2016. She has performed at Societätstheater Dresden, HAU, Theater Eigenreich, English Theatre Berlin and in the site-specific productions of the prison theater aufBruch. For the production Die vielleicht Geeigneten, or The Possibly Suitable, presented in Berlin and Vienna, she put together an ensemble that embodied the broken figures of the Peter Hoeg novel Der Plan von der Abschaffung des Dunkels, or The Plan to Do Away with Darkness: the actors Robert Farin, Vivien Andrée and Christian Kohlhofer; who were in turn guided by the stage designer Florian Guist and were helped conceptually along the way by the dramaturg Robert Wagner. Future productions will require their own respective teams and the magic of the law of attraction will ensure that they materialize.

In order to avoid becoming lost within the vortex of big data, you have to become a collection of data yourself. Quantifying in the construction of the self can help with this. After all, in irrational and unreliable times, there is a growing desire for rationalization, self-discipline and self-optimization. Will the age of the great counting come after the end of the great stories? Will objective facts help us to soon know again who were are?virtuellestheater creates open performance installation in which the status quo of our present stands at the center. Non-linear narrative forms, digital media and technology allow new perspectives upon the well-known and create spaces for thought and possibilities which are subversive and free of hierarchies.

zirka trollop is Anja Gessenhardt and Jana Korb. Their examination of Kafka’s story Erstes Leid (First Sorrow) not only took place within the framework of an individual production, instead, and more accurately, it has accompanied the two of them since the beginning of their artistic work.The first part of the trilogy, the acrobatic reading, was created in 1999 and was the beginning of their collaboration as zirka trollop. Since then, they have performed in numerous shared as well as individual productions. They began working with Kafka again in 2013 to create the second part, Aerial Theater, with Anja serving as the director and Jana as the artist. They have had the idea for the third part for quite some time and it premiered in May 2017: a solo by Anja on the Chinese pole as an homage to all stage workers without whom artistic work on stage would not be possible.